Look for stepped-up FCC enforcement of its ex parte rules, on which the first significant revision since 1997 takes effect June 1 (CD May 3 p5), commission officials said Friday. They said the revamp requiring filings to be made anytime agency officials are lobbied, and for more specific ex partes disclosures to be made, is part of making the agency more transparent. Those ex parte rules approved by commissioners in February needing Office of Management and Budget approval should get that OK soon, said Deputy General Counsel Julie Veach at an FCC and FCBA tutorial. The green light should come in time for those rules too to take effect June 1, she said. Other parts of the new rules don’t need OMB approval.

Whether ISPs have free-speech rights was debated late Thursday at an FCBA continuing education panel on net neutrality. Opponents of the FCC’s December net neutrality order, which they noted hasn’t taken effect because it hasn’t been published in the Federal Register, focused on the rights of cable operators, telcos and other network operators. Rule proponents said they see net neutrality rules as protecting the rights of broadband subscribers to free speech.

The Supreme Court has ruled different ways in First Amendment cases, depending partly on what issue is at stake, so court observers said at an FCBA panel on Thursday that they can’t generalize across all cases. In the five years under Chief Justice John Roberts, the court has accepted 19 free-speech cases that don’t have to do with religion, said First Amendment lawyer Robert Corn-Revere of Davis Wright. Of the 14 cases where the court has ruled, it decided in favor of free speech in six of them and eight times against it, he said. Roberts’ tenure hasn’t been “entirely promising,” but recent cases give free-speech proponents more to cheer about, said Corn-Revere, who moderated a panel on the First Amendment and the high court.

Local TV news isn’t irrelevant, amid an onslaught of news and opinion from websites and social media run by both professionals and amateurs, the head of the FCC’s Future of Media project said. Among the myths Steve Waldman has found as he’s putting together the study is that “traditional” local TV “is going to become irrelevant,” he said. “We're getting into the homestretch of getting this report out the door,” so “I'm getting a little bit cautious about scooping myself,” he told an FCBA continuing education event.

Few media items of major import are likely to get FCC action in the foreseeable future, as the agency continues to focus on other areas, predicted all the agency and industry officials we asked. Votes on proposed AllVid and program carriage rules (CD May 3 p8) appear to be the near-term exceptions to what may prove to be the rule, they predicted. It may be a while before the commission releases a long-anticipated mathematical model showing how TV stations’ coverage areas would be affected by the repacking of TV channels the FCC seeks as part of its hoped-for incentive auction plan. Broadband, spectrum and changing the Universal Service Fund and intercarrier compensation system likely will keep dominating the commission’s attention, said agency and media industry officials.

Sending HD versions of new films to multichannel video programming distributors remains in testing by major studios, Chris Dodd said in his first speech in Washington since joining the MPAA about seven weeks ago. “Not every studio has made the same decision” to test “the viability of it,” he told us during a Q-and-A before media executives and lobbyists and FCC staffers. During prepared remarks at a Media Institute lunch on Tuesday and in answering questions, the new MPAA chairman several times said new technologies are spurring people to view movies in theaters. Dodd used his speech to seek a crackdown on piracy.

Career staffers continue working out how the FCC should implement legislation passed last year intended to put low-power FM stations on equal footing with other types of radio stations, agency and industry officials said. They said officials from the Media Bureau and Office of General Counsel have been figuring out what steps to take to fulfill the requirements of the Local Community Radio Act, signed into law in January by President Barack Obama. A possibility is the release of a rulemaking notice on how the legislation affects an auction of translator stations and another one on other effects of the law, communications lawyers watching the staff work said. No items appear ready to be circulated for a vote, officials inside and outside the commission said.

The FCC should extend a video description deadline for TV stations and cable operators, and the agency’s proposed Jan. 1, 2012 start is too soon, those industries said. The commission proposed in March to require Big Four broadcast network affiliates in the 25 largest markets and multichannel video programming distributors with more than 50,000 subscribers to have descriptions by then. NAB sought until Oct. 1, 2012, and NCTA asked the rules take effect in the fourth quarter of next year.

The many millions of dollars in higher expenses from carrying the Tennis Channel more widely on Comcast systems far outweighed any benefit the cable operator would get from striking the deal the independent programmer sought, a Comcast executive testified late Thursday afternoon. It appears that few or no cable subscribers would cancel their service if they couldn’t get the sports channel on popular programming packages, said Greg Rigdon, hired by Comcast to begin overseeing cable programming starting in February 2011. Likewise few customers would sign up if the channel were available more widely than on the sports tier, where it costs $5 a month, he said.

An FCC auction of 144 FM licenses garnered muted bidding, with 35 percent of the construction permits failing after three rounds Wednesday to get the minimum bid set by the agency. Meanwhile, deals to sell radio stations continue to be fewer than in previous years, and some industry officials said that’s borne out by the auction results. There are some positive signs for AM and FM mergers and acquisitions, with the market for deals for stations generating cash flow picking up, they said. Radio M&A activity has been declining for years, from a height in 1999 of $28.5 billion to transactions in the hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years (CD Aug 30 p1).